The Tea Party movement and immigration politics

Tea Party protester dressed as the Statue of Liberty - Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One relatively unnoticed fact about the National Tea Party Convention that began yesterday in Nashville is the prominence there of anti-illegal immigration activists.

As I tell in an article I have out today at New America Media, the Tea Party movement is becoming the locus for a great deal of immigration activism, focused on advocating get-tough policies against illegal immigration and derailing any White House attempt to push immigration legislation that includes a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.

There are a lot of questions surrounding the Tea Party movement in terms of how united they truly are on any issue besides limited government and lower taxes. Some people I spoke to expressed doubts the Tea Party movement had truly embraced immigration as an issue, and they said that any specific views on immigration were not necessarily applicable to the movement as a whole or a majority of tea partiers. It’s an important point to keep in mind. Also, after reporting on the movement I’ve come to think that it is unfairly caricatured, to a great extent, in much media coverage. Far from a seething crowd of angry and fearful people, I encountered polite and earnest activists thoroughly and thoughtfully engaged with the political process at a very tangible grassroots level. The Tea Party movement is just that– a movement. Social movements are notoriously mercurial, amorphous, and horizontal. Attempts to characterize all tea partiers on the basis of one or two YouTube videos showing protesters hoisting risque or offensive posters would be misleading.

Nonetheless, the inclusion at the Nashville event of anti-illegal immigration crusader Tom Tancredo as kick off speaker, and the invitation of NumbersUSA, a Washington, D.C. group that advocates for lower immigration levels, signals at least a strong interest in immigration politics. I also spoke to Tea Party movement activists or politicians with Tea Party affinities in different parts of the country who have together pushed immigration policy towards the front-burner.

Marco Rubio’s upstart conservative bid for the U.S. Senate in Florida, Judge Roy Moore for governor in Alabama, congressional races in North Carolina– I found evidence that all these races had felt the impact of Tea Party-linked pushes on the immigration issue.

The link between the Tea Party movement and immigration, of course, can be traced back to the health care debates of last summer. Illegal immigration became an important part of that conversation. In one North Carolina town hall event last August that I write about, a Tea Party movement-organized health care debate included panelists who are well-known immigration restrictionists and discussions of “anchor babies,” as well as criticisms of federal laws that provide for medical interpreters at publicly-funded hospitals.

Finally, though, as one of my sources says lower down in the article, the direction the Tea Party movement takes on immigration is still up in the air. The movement’s powerful allies in the country’s political establishment may work with grassroots activists to articulate the movement and raise its profile. If the movement consolidates, these leaders– Sarah Palin, former House majority leader Dick Armey– will have influence in determining the tone and substance of the Tea Party immigration platform. Here’s that part of the article:

Not everyone agrees that Tea Party organizing has begun exerting a significant influence on the immigration debate at a national level.

Tamar Jacoby, a conservative who heads ImmigrationWorks USA, a pro-immigration business group, agrees that Tea Partiers may take up immigration in earnest in the future.

But for the time being, she sees the Tea Partiers still in a very early stage of organizing and far more zeroed-in on limited government and fiscal issues.

And the Tea Party movement’s allies in the political establishment, Republicans like Armey of FreedomWorks and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, still have a chance to influence the course Tea Party activism will take on issues such as immigration, Jacoby said. “Leadership will matter. What Palin and Armey say will be very important.”

My article gets into Palin’s and Armey’s fairly moderate stances on immigration, and this suggests to me that the immigration issue could become something of a battleground within the movement.

An immigrant advocate in Tennessee, Stephen Fotopulos, who I quote at the end of the article, makes an interesting point, too. He mentions the case of Harold Ford, Jr. who ran for statewide office in Tennessee before turning up in New York to run for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Ford ran fairly strong-worded ads against illegal immigration in Tennessee, and those may be a liability in New York state, where immigrant voters wield serious influence. Fotopulos’s point: however much the Tea Party movement influences candidates toward a position on immigration, there are always costs to a certain stance.

A pro-immigrant, pro-legalization stance carries political risks, which is well known– but so does a hardline stance that might be perceived as hostile by immigrant families and voters.